The South Wing

Ikea's Planned Obsolescence (Everyday Living, Everyday Forgetting), oil and metallic on linen, 13.75 by 39.75 inches, 2009, Courtesy of Greg Lindquist

“Landscape is one of the oldest traditions of painting other than portraiture,” says 29-year-old artist Greg Lindquist in the large, open studio he shares with two other artists in Greenpoint, a largely Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His rectangular, steely paintings–some modest, some imposing in their size–hang on the walls, and an enormous wooden panel painted a slightly metallic silver–which will be his next painting–lays on his work table. But Lindquist’s landscapes feel new; panoramic industrial wastelands in cool gray tones painted with metal pigments, these are no water lillies. These are the decaying landfills and boat yards of Staten Island, the languishing factories on the Brooklyn waterfront, the construction sites where modernist buildings are torn down to make way for luxury condos and Ikeas. “These spaces aren’t really beautiful, but I do think there’s some beauty to them,” he says. His work aims to preserve that which is disappearing in the midst of gentrification and outsourcing: the disappearing industrial landscape of New York.

I first met Lindquist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tall, reedy, porcelain-skinned, soft-spoken, clad in black and gray, he looked exactly like the sort of person you would meet at an art museum, at a press preview, in New York. He was also the only other art lover under the age of 50 walking among the luminous still-lifes of Pierre Bonnard in the Met’s cavernous Robert Lehman Wing, and we sort of bonded in our conspicuous youth. We talked Bonnard, Morandi, writing art reviews (he was on assignment for The Brooklyn Rail) and his own (gasp!) landscapes. I was intrigued. Landscapes: how outre, old-fashioned, unpostmodern! He invited me to see his paintings; I said sure. I was happy I did.

As the up-and-coming artist prepares for his solo exhibition “Brooklyn Industry,” opening Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and running through April 26, he takes some time to chat about art, Ikea, MTV’s The Real World, and getting out of New York.

I showed some of your photographs to my cousin, and she asked, “Oh, are these photographs or paintings?” Well, you do paint from photographs, and you’ve written about contemporary landscape and its relationship to digital photography and media. What is the relationship–and how does your work relate to that?

So, I basically wrote about three contemporary landscape painters who were all connected through referencing the Hudson River School Tradition, which was in the early 1800s/ late 1700s, these painters documenting United States’ uncharted, undeveloped territory. Basically what I found was that all three painters either embraced or rejected technology in their processes.

So, for example, Will Cotton, who makes these elaborate ginger bread houses and confectionary sculptures of landscapes out of sweets–he takes still photography as well as video, and he uses those to use as visual references for his final paintings. Benjamin Edwards actually creates corporate architecture through home architectural-rendering programs that are like autocat but are for the general person who wants to redesign their garden or re-landscape their property.  So he actually uses that and he projects the images with a digital projector.

And then Rackstraw Downes–the third artist–actually rejects technology completely and the use of photography. He paints on site, and he paints only with an easel and a paintbrush. He doesn’t see any type of reference photographs, and ironically enough, his work kind of encompasses these panoramas that very much look like a fish-eye lens, so they look like photography.

My work is kind of a combination of all those things. I mean, I work from photographs–photographic references–so I’ll actually go to these places with a camera and take all these pictures, and then I’ll come back to my studio and I’ll manipulate stuff and crop in Photoshop, adjust levels, make things lighter or darker. And then I make slides, and I work from the slides–onto the canvasses. So it’s kind of interesting because when you are looking at those things the computer–it’s a photograph of a painting that’s done from a photograph, so there’s kind of this imbrications of translations that happen from the initial space that’s documented to what you’re looking at when you’re looking at a reproduction of it.

What about photography as an end-means?

Well, that’s kind of interesting, because when I was in grad school I was doing these drawings that were charcoal, and I was erasing out the charcoal and I was making these–they sort of looked like daguerreotype. One of my professors looked at the photograph I was working from–it was black and white–and he said “This is better than your paintings” and “you should just do this.” It was kind of like a back-handed compliment, but … I could have done that. But at the end I want to make a painting, I don’t want to make photographs. And there’s a long history of painters working from photographs, from Manet to Gerhard Richter, who kind of blurred out the images even more with paint. So I guess what I hope is I’m taking the structure from the photograph and then applying that to a painting in which I am engaged in the material aspects of making a painting.

Talking about documentation, you document things in transition, places being built or rebuilt–the Brooklyn waterfront, for example. I was wondering, when you were talking about going to the Eastern Bloc the other day to paint the site of a concrete factory, if that is a place in development, or is it just aesthetically like the places you like to paint? If you’re not painting something that’s in transition, how does that change your work, how does that change your approach? death proof from grindhouse online

That’s a good question, because as you said a lot of these are about places in transition, I mean, you have these decrepit, run-down industrial buildings, which used to be factories, and now they’re kind of being transformed into these commercial condos and residential places. To me this is kind of like an economic phenomenon. I’ve talked to my brother, who’s an international economist for the Treasury, and I say, “You should write an essay for this book I’ll do one day about the economics of decay.” It’s kind of an interesting idea because these places exist in part because the real estate value allows them to, because, I mean, there’s no value….

So I think, to answer your question, it’s a different part along that same continuum of decay and renewal, although it’s–it’s like if you look at it at an arc then it’s an earlier stage and about Azerbaijan and Georgia, I mean, there’s been a huge economic boom since the collapse of dissolution of the Soviet Union, and so, as I understand it–I mean I don’t know a lot about this but–what I have done from research is that the Soviet Union had annexed these countries and basically they had one place, for example, in a country where all the concrete was made for the whole Soviet Union so you had these sprawling factories that when the Soviet Union collapsed they just shut down. And because Georgia is under a free economy now, it’s kind of struggling to rebuild, so there’s a lot of decay. It’s still a very poor country and these spaces are kind of decrepit–nature has reclaimed them and overgrown. So I’m getting this sense that it’s going to be like that until its economy picks up even more.

Also Azerbaijan has this huge oil industry, so there are these oil fields that are shut down … And so right now part of the boom, in part, is because of this oil line that goes from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. So there’s all this building in a very similar way as the Brooklyn waterfront. So it would be interesting to kind of see how visually these forms compare.

Because I’m interested in the forms of decay too–how it looks. A lot of these buildings I look at were [built] around the same time as modernism–modernist architecture–and in fact some of the buildings are made by architects who inspired modernism architects. The interesting thing is Soviet architecture at the time–you think of the big high-rises that are like concrete boxes–that is all part of modernism, but it has a different form–I mean, it has the same form but a different application. I’m kind of interested in what the visual relationships are here and how the idea of modernism was applied to different things. When you think of modernism you think of institutional buildings you think about the Guggenheim, not necessarily factory architecture, or Soviet architecture for that matter.

That’s interesting because a lot of talk about your work has taken the sort of gentrification angle, and now you’re speaking about form and aesthetics. You take your paintings from here and they are all informed by your living here and seeing the community change. How does it change when you go somewhere you’ve never been before?

One of the reasons why I felt like I needed to go somewhere else, well, first of all other than New York, [was] because this is part of my experience, this is part of my every day routine. These spaces I know very well. Because of that, I feel like there’s this sort of blind-sightedness that happens to them, where I’m doing these things and I can’t really see them for what they are. And so if I were going to go somewhere else, especially somewhere I’ve never been before, hopefully I will see them in a way that is completely new, and I’ll see them in a different perspective. So it’ll be an interesting thing to see what happens and also how it relates so what are the issues here at hand outside of gentrification and preservation of architecture, especially when our country is so relatively young … I mean the idea of “ruin” being applied to this architecture is kind of weird because you think about “ruins” and you think about Rome, you think about thousands of years of buildings that have survived, and this is like a hundred years–our country’s history is not much older than that.

How did you get into these decaying landscapes? How do you find your subjects? Like with [the Williamsburg paintings], was it just something you saw and connected with or were you looking for it specifically to document?

So, basically I went to NC State University college of design, which has, historically, its architectural program–it has a huge link to Black Mountain College–all these Bauhaus architects were there, Frank Lloyd Wright … So I had friends who were architecture students. One of my friends, Pace, he was obsessed with this mall, and at this point it was being torn down … This was the biggest indoor mall on the East Cost between Washington D.C. and Atlanta  … So he and my other friends started going there at night and breaking into as it was being gutted out and taking photographs, exploring it. And so like we went while it was being gutted and so it’s this really strange space of absence when you have like these stores that have display cases that are completely empty, there’s no people around, they are like ripping up tiles on the stairways it literally looked kind of apocalyptic, like it was being bombed out. And coincidentally that was around the same time that we went to war. So it was kind of, in terms of synchronicity, it was really big …

What it was being torn down for was a mixed-use community mall, which would have condos, have shop fronts and restaurants, so you know it’s kind of on the same trajectory as gentrification and the whole idea of mixed use and how that effects your relationship to places … We went back after it had been wrecked, and I remember describing it, and what I was describing was–like the steel girders were exposed and the rubble and the rebar and the concrete–and what I was describing was exactly what I am looking at now and what I am fascinated by–how things are put together, how they’re built, how they decay, how they’re torn apart. At some point you are looking at something that you don’t know whether it’s being built or torn down. … It’s interesting to see these parallels and these recurring themes.

It’s interesting to think about this in terms of longevity, I mean this idea from the ’60s of planned obsolescence, that you’re buying something that’s going to fall apart and that you’re going to throw it away for whatever reason because a year from now something will be better or more updated.

It also dovetails into Ikea’s mission because Ikea is this cheap designer furniture and appliances and accessories, and they’re all like flat packed so they’re economically shipped, and also it’s made to fall apart. Kind of like H&M clothes. I mean, I feel like H&M clothes fall apart as they fall out of fashion. And so this whole idea of architecture and what it means and how long it’ll be there.

So, do you see this cycle changing now with the recession? Obviously there are still things being built, but …

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I’m not an economist, but I thought about that a lot when this was happening. Like, oh looks like this might not be the same, or this might change and things might slow down. And things did slow down … but it will eventually pick back up.

You said once that the most ironic thing that could happen would be if someone buys one of your paintings and then puts it up in their condo. But, one of your paintings was on MTV’s The Real World, I mean, that’s a similar thing because that was in Red Hook, one of the places you’ve painted. How was that?

That was in part why I did it, because I thought it was so just so absurd and funny. I mean, of a painting about the gentrification of Brooklyn being put … and the ironic thing about that is when I went to a wrap party for that, and immediately when I walked in the building I thought “I know this building, I did a painting of it.”

Your work has been characterized as “romantic”; do you agree with that?

See, I think [that] hinges on the idea of nostalgia. I don’t consider myself a romantic, but I think that there is some romanticizing possibly seen in the work. I try to–I mean I hope that these aren’t seen as really rosy optimistic images. But that kind of ties in with the whole idea of how we view landscape. And that can kind of be seen as, “Oh well do they celebrate this construction? Do they condemn it?” I don’t think I’m taking a clear stance on that … I might be skirting the question to some degree, but I don’t really think about those things. I think one of your questions–and I may not have answered it completely–was how did I get to this point with the work … I don’t think that I ever like made a conscious decision that I was going after something. It was just that I felt really connected with this area in my neighborhood and I spent a lot of time in it and it really hit me what I was trying to do was express landscape as some kind of documentation, document, memorial, and there was this moment that I realized that rather than paint about something else elsewhere in another time and another place that what was happening around me was just as powerful, engaging and compelling as anything else and it was part of my every day experience so there wasn’t this disconnection or as much as a disconnection.

So, what’s the difference between memorialization and documentation?

I think perhaps this might be where the romanticization comes in, cuz when documenting something is when you take a picture and you have the picture printed and you don’t manipulate it, you don’t modify it–boom, that’s a document. Memorializing something may be what I’m doing because I’m actually taking that picture, and I’m definitely transforming the form of it, making changes, changing the color palette. There’s a transformation that happens in imagery and the way it’s made, and so I think definitely that’s very different from documenting I mean I see they’re documents but they’re really pseudo-documents because I’m injecting a certain mood into it. So I think that’s maybe where the romanticization comes in too cuz I’m giving it a certain feeling. And maybe I’m not acknowledging that as a feeling but more as “This is the color palette I like” and “This is the atmosphere or the weather that’s in New York, this white light from the hazy sky and pollutants.” But you’re right, and I’m really conscious of that, and it’s not a document [and] it calls into all kind of questions as to what is actually authentic and what is a document or what has been manipulated or been modified by someone’s view or someone’s agenda.

Well, some people say there’s no such thing as objectivity.

I guess the question is what’s the truth, what aspect of it is the truth , and what aspect is transformed because I think whenever you process something through a personal filter it’s going to be no longer some objective truth it’s going to express some personal truth, and I guess that’s what painting is about.

To check out some of Greg Lindquist’s prints, please go to 20×200. To find out more about the artist, go to www.greglindquist.com.